If there’s one thing that will guarantee to shock you about The Jeremy Kyle Show – yes, more than the show titled “I’ll Marry You If You Prove You Only Cheated 18 Times!”, more than the other show titled “Your Boyfriend Killed My Hamster!”, more than the episode called “Leave Your Fiancé, He Had Sex With Me In A Graveyard!” and even more than the one with the simple, sad premise “Amanda Strongly Denies Having Fleas” – it’s that it had regular guests. Regular. Guests. Not audience members. Not sidekicks. Guests. You know how Bill Murray used to appear on David Letterman’s show all the time or how Billy Connolly would forever be popping up on Parkinson? Well, it was a little like that, only for people who want to live their life as an open wound.

Take Melissa Ede. Ede was barely off The Jeremy Kyle Show. Between driving a taxi (her day job), making topless YouTube videos of herself with mayonnaise bottles strung from her breasts (her hobby) and campaigning for transgender rights (her passion, having previously been a man), Ede made appearance after appearance on The Jeremy Kyle Show.

Her first was titled “My Transgender Love Rival Is Trying To Steal My Husband!” Others involved her daughter (“My Dad Became A Woman Then Told Me I Wasn’t His Daughter! DNA Results”). When she scooped an unlikely lottery win – £4 million from a scratchcard – it was simply more reason for further appearances.

Well before the controversy that saw The Jeremy Kyle Show shut down for good – after a guest, Steve Dymond, killed himself after his fiancée accused him of infidelity and he failed a lie detector test on the programme – it was people such as Ede that highlighted what the show was really about.

A judge in 2007 infamously called it “human bear-baiting” while sentencing a man who head-butted a lodger who’d had an affair with his wife (he found out on the show, naturally). But that’s not quite right – because here they reused the bears.

They reused the likes of Danny Fuller, a “sex addict” father of eight. He appeared on the show five times. They reused the likes of Stephen Beer, who weighs 30 stone and made six appearances – he first appeared on a TV show called Too Fat To Work, about how he was too large to do things.

Google around and it’s not actually hard to find these regulars.

Why does this matter? Because on a one-off appearance on a one-off show – no matter how terrible the title – you could just about swallow the line that guests were cared for and treated like humans, just about believe the “significant and detailed duty of care processes in place”, as an ITV statement has it, “built up over 14 years”.

You could even forget, albeit briefly, the litany of past Jeremy Kyle Show producers who all describe an environment where guests were kept apart and “talked up” to ensure they’d be in a state of maximum agitation when the cameras rolled. You could even argue, if you wanted, that this was, after all, the last vestige of reality TV – in a world of semi-scripted reality-lite – that was actually real.

But the show calling back these guests again and again… well, the bears weren’t dead yet, were they? They could go again. Is it any wonder there were casualties?

Melissa Ede is dead, having been found slumped in her car in May. Danny Fuller has spoken about the emotional trauma the appearances wreaked upon him. And 30-stone Stephen Beer? He also tried to kill himself, telling his local news site, PlymouthLive, that the day after his last appearance, “I tried attempting suicide.” The police eventually sectioned him. And what was that last appearance, you ask?

It was Melissa Ede’s first, the one titled “My Transgender Love Rival Is Trying To Steal My Husband!” Beer, uncomfortably spread on a seat, was the husband accused of having the affair. Except, he later said, it was all fiction.

“It was about me having an affair with Melissa, but I didn’t,” he states. “How could I? I had two carers coming every day.” They made it up, he said, “because The Jeremy Kyle Show had a spare slot and when that happens they contact people to ask if they want to come on”.

Seen like this, The Jeremy Kyle Show wasn’t just reality TV, it was resource depletion, human deforestation.

Sure, you could easily say it only gives the same enjoyment as a middle-class audience get from the vicarious thrill of a Twitter spat – The Jeremy Kyle Show as long-form Twitter.

But then you’d have to imagine this: Twitter seeking out the most vulnerable, broken users, coaching these people in what to write for maximum online vilification and then watching in glee as the subsequent online abuse went viral. And then they’d give it a couple of weeks before they’d ask if they want to do it again.

In the last episode in which Beer appears, by the way, Kyle performs one of his regular flourishes, one designed to impart virtue and some kind of moral indignation. He tells Beer, firmly and clearly, “Don’t come on my show again.”